debated by many analysts), the main theme of the Indian politics has been to look into factors which can "aggregate, articulate and eventually incorporate" individual interests and structure it along political majority in a hierarchical society based on social group affinity through "fusion of endogenous political norms and alien political institutions" (p. 23). The study critically analyses the theoretical relations between competitive politics and social change in the context of the derivative politics of the post-colonial state under the Developmental (Rostow, Huntington, Myrdal, Shils, Weiner, Field, Smith, Frankel and Rao, Hardgrave, Beteille, Madan, Mitra, etc.), Functional (Dumont, Bailey, Morris-Jones, and others) and Revolutionary paradigms (Rajni Palme Dutt, Frankel, Moore, Kohli, Byres, Harris, Guha, et al) (pp. 28-36) and underlines their drawbacks.

These paradigms are organised around a set of parameters, which are not germane to experience since they were born under different conditions and therefore, result in disassociation between "belief and practice, categories and intellectuals and most alarmingly society and its intellectual."

The ironic consequence of this confusion is the rich abundance of terms of political discourse jostling for public recognition, which are unable to give an answer to complex interaction of political democracy and social change that cause certain aberration of democratic form of government. Hence the authors go on to offer an Indian model with a broad convergence of the existing models along with the formulations of Kothari, Sheth and Frankel 8t Rao. The basic parameters of this model is "political participation, the ability of the political system to give shape to many of the initiatives from below and ideas from above in the shape of the new institutions and . . . combine normal political action with rationale protest" (p. 36).

The proposed model has two objectives, (a) promotion of social change based on equality and federalism and, (b) bringing changes in a democratic manner. The authors point out that the election and democracy have kept pace with one another. The high degree of participation from all sections has led to transformation from vertical mobilisation to horizontal mobilisation which has significantly altered the dominance structures of the society without developing chaotic cracks, as predicted by Huntington and others. The book also correlates inter-generational divide with a large number of variables and concludes that the attitude of both the older and present generations towards parliamentary democracy, rule of law, a professional and politically neutral army remains the same but the